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Abstract and Keywords

The ancient Roman Empire loomed large in the early modern imagination. Shakespeare wrote and co-wrote a number of plays and poems about ancient Rome, the most important of which, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, recount the last days of the Roman Republic and the empire's foundation. His late play, Cymbeline, reflects the early modern tensions within English and British imperial ideology concerning identification with and rejection of Roman imperialism. More than any other Shakespeare play, The Tempest lends itself to the topic of empire, directly addressing the related subject of how to justify the conquest of overseas populations and the colonization of unfamiliar lands.

Brian C. Lockey is Associate Professor of English Literature at St John's University in New York City. He is author of Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature (2006), and his articles have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studie s. He has recently co‐edited (along with Barbara Fuchs) a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies on literary and historical perspectives on early modern Anglo‐Spanish relations. He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: Writing from the Margins of Renaissance England.

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